“Shaving the yak” is a phrase used to describe the process of programming. It alludes to the fact that you often have to take two, or more, steps backward in order to eventually move one step forward. You want a sweater, so first you need to get some yarn, but to do that you have to… and eventually you find yourself shaving a yak. The reason why you even consider shaving a yak is that, once you’ve shaved said yak, you now have lots of yarn, which allows you to make many sweaters. This colorful analogy has a surprising number of online images, and even an O’Reilly book. It’s a thing.

I have been doing a lot of digital yak-shaving over the past four months. Come to think of it, most of my blog posts consist of yak shaving.

So if you’re interested in learning to code with Python but not sure whether it’s worth it, or if you just want to read an overview of how I used Python and QGIS to create a map like this from a big Word document, then continue reading.

The deadline for panel/paper proposals for the Society for Military History’s annual conference next May is coming up, October 1. We’re in the process of putting together two panels early modern European proposals as I write this, but we’d love to have an early modern take-over of the SMH next year. The conference will be held at my alma mater of Ohio State (Columbus, OH), and the conference theme is “Soldiers and Civilians in the Cauldron of War,” although papers/panels on any germane topic will be considered.

So if you’re interested, get together with some of your friends and propose. If you need help finding co-panelists, you can contact me via the blog, or you can use the SMH’s new Panels Seeking Panelists online forum.

So what’s new in the world of EMEM historiography? The French are on the attack.

Sure, English historians continue to dominate the fiscal-military side of the ledger, as well as war-and-society topics. And, yes, the Germans continue their obsession with the Altagsgeschichte (everyday history) of the Thirty Years War. Italianists are even paying more attention to the Wars of Italy of the 16th century. Germanic scholars, both German and Dutch/Belgian, seem a bit more interested in the diplomatic history of these early modern wars as well. And even Spanish scholars are starting to write about their own wars from the period. And there are actually quite a few scholars working on those Terrible Turks as well, from what I can tell. But don’t worry, English-language collections still tend to serve as the default smorgasbord of different regions and decades, by scholars from around the globe.

Finally, though, French historians have embraced their inner giant. If you’ve read my past bibliography posts, you’ve already seen this trend in my shift to including foreign-language – primarily French-language – publications. And this trend has only increased over the past few years, now that there’s a cadre of young (and older) French historians who have rediscovered the early modern age in all its martial glory. And they’ve got the conferences and edited collections to prove it. I’ve already mentioned a few of the recent publications over the past few years, but I’ll briefly re-cite them in one place, so you can see the trend:

If I were to include the chapters in these collections, they would easily number a couple hundred from several dozen authors. But just from the above titles and contributors, you can see the progression:

from doyens of the French historical establishment – André Corvisier, Jean-Pierre Bois, Jean Bérenger and Jean Chagniot most prominently – being festschrifted at the tail end of their careers

to a whole host of mid-career converts and newly-minted disciples. The military history of early modern France, and of Louis XIV’s age in particular, is definitely on the rise.

Just as interestingly, the French interest in war and society, evidenced in the early (1960s-1970s) works of scholars like Corvisier and Bois, has subsided a bit, many following the path of Corvisier, who turned, by the 1980s, to a more focused look at the sharp end of war in his La bataille de Malplaquet 1709: L’effondrement de la France évité (1997). After a brief flirtation with the Military Revolution, French military-historical scholarship of the past two decades has specialized in case studies (primarily of France) and topical analyses (primarily of France). Cultural and social topics continue to receive attention, bien sûr, but what’s striking is how traditional military subjects have also seen a renaissance. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that the Service historique de la Defense is supporting such researches with conferences and publication assistance.

This return to histoire événementielle appears a reverse image of what’s happened in the U.S. over the same timeframe. Even though Hervé Drévillon attributed the recent increase in early modern French military history to the influence of John Lynn’s Giant of the Grand Siècle (1997), Lynn’s own work has gone in a somewhat different direction ever since (after, it should be noted, beginning in the French Revolutionary armies). After his 1999 narrative of the Wars of Louis XIV, he shifted gears to works on women in early modern armies, just finished a book on modern terrorism, and is currently working on a broad history of surrender. This, I think, is more than a single example of a declining interest in the details of EMEMH among American academics: there are, to my knowledge, only a handful of young American scholars focusing on the period of 17C-18C European warfare (defined broadly), much less traditional military history (however that’s defined). And several of these focus much more on the later 18C into the Revolution.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, since I’d be hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of Ph.D. programs with more than a solitary European military historian (again, defined broadly) who could serve as advisor. I don’t mean to restart the old flame wars of ‘whither military history?’ and cast blame and rend garments, other than to suggest that, perhaps, the golden age of American students of EMEMH in the 1980s to late 1990s, advised by scholars like Joe Guilmartin, Geoffrey Parker and John Lynn at Ohio State and Illinois, where we had a dozen or more graduate students all working on the same general area, was an unsustainable deviation from the norm – unless you’re an American doing American history, or at least doing modern history. Maybe structural and institutional factors helped re-establish the normal state of affairs: the brutal job market for History Ph.D.s over the past several decades (or more!) certainly hasn’t helped matters. Last statistics I saw from the American Historical Association, a few years back, estimated about 1%-2% of academic historians were self-declared “military” historians, perhaps a bit more than the number of academic “diplomatic” historians. Perhaps it’s only natural, as well, that national history dominates a country’s historiographical interests, even in as large a country as the United States.

But back to the point: French military history is on the rise, and it’s hardly a surprise that they are focusing on their own nation’s martial past. In case we needed further evidence of the rise of EMFrenchMH, and of the concomitant necessity to read French, we can add one more publication to the above list, an edited collection which includes some familiar faces, as well as some new ones.

And for those who need statistics from my first full academic year of real GTD use:
Total tasks completed (i.e. those that I bothered to enter into Pocket Informant and not just do right away) from 2015.08.22 to 2016.05.11:
1200 tasks (probably 3-5 hours-worth of entry time over the span of 8 months).

And to see how much I used the various pieces of metadata, and to get a better sense of what I did with my time, in broad brushstrokes, I record the following summaries for posterity:

I wouldn’t analyze these too closely, since some tasks were deleted, since not every task had every possible piece of metadata – some of them were just ephemeral reminders to myself (“Bring cheese”) set up with Siri, and since different tasks required differing amounts of time to complete. But still, it’s kinda interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing…

And speaking of generic end-of-academic-year checklists:

Clean work office

Inventory work office supplies

Bring home perishable food items (office, fridge)

Clean up computer folders on work computer

Copy work computer course folders to Dropbox

Order any outstanding textbooks for next semester

Wish happy summer to faculty/staff

Return library books

Update CV

Write semester-end thoughts for each course (keep textbook? different assignments…)

Brainstorm generic teaching improvements

Clean home office

Ha! Thought I’d let a GTD post go by without a checklist? You’ve been chklstd!

If you haven’t already heard, John (“Joe”) Guilmartin died last week. Best known to early modern military historians for his detailed work on Mediterranean naval warfare, he was a wide-ranging scholar who published on topics ranging from the Ancient world to Europe to the Americas to aerial combat to the Vietnam War.

He taught at several schools, spending most of his academic career at Ohio State, where he advised 200 students through the graduate school process. His former students, this one at least, remembers him as a jovial fellow always sharing historical factoids whenever the mood struck. If you’ve read his classic Gunpowder and Galleys, you already know that his engineering background was hard to repress, even if that meant chalking the equation for drag coefficients on the board during a History seminar on military technology, to the befuddlement of at least one of his students. Just as irrepressible was his homespun wisdom, whether describing the vigorous military mindset as “Hey diddle, diddle, straight up the middle”, or reassuring his charges that if the earth were to split open between his feet, he would automatically jump left, lest, in his hesitation, the earth swallowed him. And, though I missed his class lecture on siege warfare, his encouragement of my research on the 1708 siege of Lille, along with his early adoption of graphics, had a major influence on my future research path.

For more evidence of his very full life, see his homepage here. Several of his former advisees are preparing a festschrift in his honor.

There aren’t that many EMEMH panels, but there’s at least one of note. There are also, as usual, several panels on 17C-18C America, a few on Native Americans and other indigenes, a sprinkling of Ancients, and a few on environment/topography. None on medieval or Napoleonic this year – I’ll assume the SMH often competes with the Woodstock party that is Kalamazoo.

So I’m thinking we should try to organize some informal EMEMH get-together sometime during the conference. Could be drinks, lunch or even dinner. Let us know in the comments if anyone is game, and we can try to figure something out.